Linux Mint’s next major 23.0 release, scheduled for Christmas 2026, is shaping up to be important for Cinnamon users, especially those waiting for the desktop environment to embrace Wayland.
In the project’s latest monthly update, Linux Mint lead Clement Lefebvre revealed that Wayland support in Cinnamon has progressed beyond experimental status. Starting with the next Cinnamon 6.8 version, both X11 and Wayland sessions will be fully supported.
Among the most important improvements are fixes for window handling under Wayland. New windows, applet popups, and context menus should now be mapped more accurately in size and position. Focus stealing prevention has also improved to stop applications from unexpectedly grabbing attention.
The Mint team also fixed many crash scenarios across Cinnamon, Muffin, cinnamon-session, and Xwayland. Additionally, multi-monitor setups and KVM switches have been improved.
Performance and rendering get a serious boost, as the upcoming Cinnamon work includes hardware acceleration across the compositor, desktop session, and both native Wayland and Xwayland clients. Linux Mint also mentions hardware-accelerated GBM over EGL for NVIDIA, improving Wayland usability for NVIDIA users.
On top of that, the team says Cinnamon’s Wayland session now has full HiDPI support, including crisp icons, cursor fixes, and fixes for issues affecting Chromium-based apps like Slack and VS Code. This should make the desktop look cleaner on modern high-resolution displays.
There are also some smaller practical improvements. Window Progress support is coming to Wayland, allowing apps like Firefox to show download progress in the panel’s app button. Root applications launched via pkexec will now run as Wayland clients instead of falling back to Xwayland. Session handling has also been fixed.
Cinnamon itself is gaining a new command called cinnamon-list-windows, designed to list all open windows and show useful details such as their position, size, HiDPI status, application information, and backend. Plus, Muffin, Cinnamon’s window manager and compositor, now rounds coordinates and dimensions for all Clutter actors.
Linux Mint is also adding support for systemd’s graphical-session, which should improve compatibility with upstream projects that expect this functionality to be present.
Outside the Wayland and Cinnamon work, SSH keyring support has been improved system-wide, LightDM configuration fixes have been implemented, and fingerprint login in Slick Greeter has been improved: placing a finger on the reader is now enough to log in without pressing Enter afterward.
For more details, see Mint’s June newsletter.
slowly but surely.
cool.
My last hope on the wayland list is Xfce4 (with the new name I forgot) and
Enlightenment (maybe I still can dream for a another decade…).